coraline

is it's remarkably flat.

serenejournal

Planning to knit a Shakespeare's Sonnets Scarf. Because people are doing binary scarfs, and I think iambic pentameter deserves some love.

joedecker

Well, one answer is "I should be so lucky as to have critics." I mean, in a professional sense, my work has not attracted enough attention to warrant reviews in the sort of publications that review art stuff.

But I do get feedback on my work occasionally from potential customers, etc. And when I take photographic workshops, I'll sometimes take them from people who can give qualified feedback on my work--but those folks will be coming from a nature photography POV, it's a fairly prosaic artform in general.

From theoretically potential customers (or, more properly, people I meet in settings in which I might expect the person might be a potential customer, e.g., at an art show, the very folks who take the time to come up and criticize the images, with very limited exceptions, are being argumentative for the enjoyment of being argumentative. It took me a little time to recognize that their anger issues weren't my problem and to figure out how to derail them.

This is different than the folks who will come up and engage me about what I'm trying to do with a piece or a set of pieces, where the dicussion tends to be friendly and not lead with rude. But there's usually some positive there, after all, most people walk by things that don't move them--they don't engage with it.

The photo workshops--I'll take workshops from folks like the late Galen Rowell, Jack Dykinga, Frans Lanting. (People who do work similar to mine that I admire and who have Made It.) Jack's not as critical as Frans, Frans as Galen was, but all three of them managed to keep the tone constructive. It took practice to deal with photographic criticism without getting defensive (mostly).


Really, I'm pretty fortunate, though. In the end, I totally glow when someone "gets" one of my pieces and enjoys it. Someone like Mike Johnson at TOP calls attention to Snowy Pinnacles at Dusk and I'm all aglow. But 99% of the reason I do the photography isn't for those strokes (they're nice), most of the reason I do it is because in the end, I end up making a lot of images that I really am proud of. Oh, not all the 350+ images on my web site fill me with equal glee, I need to take a few more culls through the site, but I do photography because it makes me happy and sane and fulfilled to do it, and it makes me happy to see the few results i'm truly proud of.

Not all of them have to rise to quite that level. Some that aren't my absolute best are pieces that are treasured by people for one reason or another. That's okay. It makes someone happy, and moreover, it's part of the process of artmaking.

Finally, we get to my worst critic. Me.

Oh, I'll certainly defend some "faults" one or two self-appointed internet gurus have made of my work at some point in the past or another, because, well, I'm right and they were wrong. :p It's not entirely fair to say that I'm the harshest critic. But in some ways, I'm the harshest critic that matters. There isn't a single piece of work (well, maybe one) that I didn't wish could have been a little different in some respect. Get some beer into me and I can regale you with long stories about what's not perfect about a particular image in mine. Might not even take beer. :)

That too is part of the process. Being constantly critical of one's own work is part of whatever it is that makes me need to keep making it. It's a good thing, it just took me a few years to learn to step back and to see that that self-criticism is an essential part of the process. How do I cope with it? Practice.

It helps to reread this quote, amoung others, from Bayles and Orland's "Art & Fear" on a regular basis.

”The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.”

Those guys understand.